How to hire when 242 people apply for every job
Plus: the AI sceptics just changed their minds
· 767 words
Christian Woese & Melanie Gabriel
July 21, 2026 • Read time: 4 minutes
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Amazon is retiring Mechanical Turk, the marketplace it named after the eighteenth-century chess automaton that turned out to have a man hidden inside it. The service existed so that machines could rent human judgement for the work they could not do, and by 2023 researchers found up to 46% of its workers were quietly using LLMs to supply it. The internet hid humans inside machines, trained machines on those humans, and has now filled the human marketplace with machines pretending to be human. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week's cocktail party
Uber buys Delivery Hero in a €13bn deal
Uber agreed to acquire Berlin's Delivery Hero for €13bn, an all-cash offer at €41.50 per share that creates a delivery platform spanning 99 countries. Uber committed to keeping the Berlin headquarters and workforce through at least 2029, plus €2bn of investment in Germany by 2031. Europe's biggest delivery group now reports to San Francisco.
Helsing raises $1.8bn at an $18bn valuation
Munich's Helsing closed a $1.8bn Series E at an $18bn valuation, among the largest rounds ever raised by a European startup. Goldman Sachs Alternatives, JPMorganChase, CPP Investments, Lightspeed and Dragoneer all came in, with demand well above the allocation. Helsing keeps widening out from battlefield software into drones, underwater surveillance and autonomous aircraft.
Neko Health raises $700m before its US launch
Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne's body-scanning company raised $700m at close to a $7bn valuation, roughly four times its January 2025 mark. Lightspeed led, and Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Ferriss and will.i.am joined personally. The first US clinic opens in Manhattan this summer, against a waiting list the FT puts at around 350,000 people.
We talked to Neko's Chief People Officer Noa Perry-Reifer about scaling culture without breaking.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
The sceptics just changed their minds
More than 200 economists and AI researchers signed a four-sentence statement organised by Stanford's Digital Economy Lab, warning that AI could reshape the economy faster than the Industrial Revolution did and asking governments to prepare now. The letter itself is restrained. What matters is who signed it: Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson spent years arguing that near-term labour disruption was overstated, and they signed anyway. When the doubters start hedging, is it worth asking what they can suddenly see?
Own the technology, and the money behind it
Klaus Hommels closed an oversubscribed $300m defence and dual-use fund at Lakestar and used the announcement to argue that Europe's reliance on American technology has become a strategic vulnerability. His trigger was Washington moving to restrict exports of advanced Anthropic models: access you do not control is not access. The fund already backs Helsing, Isar Aerospace and Arx Robotics, and BAE Systems came in as an LP.
We talked to Proton's Andy Yen about European tech sovereignty.
Smart hack
From our Partners
Your competitor's growth lead already saw the spend spike.
While your team is still in standup, the other growth lead already got the alert. Viktor is an AI employee that lives in Slack. It watches your Meta and TikTok spend overnight, flags the underperformer by 7am, and drafts the new brief before your first meeting.
From us
Hiring in 2026 means drowning. The average posting now draws 242 applicants, and LinkedIn logs 11,000 applications a minute, up 45% year on year. Foundra's playbook for hiring inside the flood is refreshingly analogue:
Ask 20 people for one name each. Not a share on LinkedIn, one name. Referred candidates convert 7x better than job board applicants.
Read the applications yourself. The famous "75% get auto-rejected by the ATS" line traces back to a 2012 sales pitch, not to research. Fifty applications read properly beats 500 scored by a model.
Pay for the work sample. Two hours maximum, $100+ for anything longer, and designed so that generic AI output cannot pass it.
Do the arithmetic before you post. Fully loaded cost is salary plus 25 to 30%. If you cannot name the six-month milestone, you are not ready to hire.